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There’s been a lot of noise about 3D printing and how this could become mainstream and ‘hit the High Street‘ but there’s clearly a lot of uncertainty as to how and when this may happen.

The opportunities for 3D printing are vast and often nicely positioned as ‘the end of Made in China‘. I was amazed to see how far the technology has come and that objects as diverse and important as ‘human’ body organs through to a whole house. As someone who recently reviewed their personal investments 3D printing businesses have been articulated as ‘the next Microsoft or Apple’ potential – albeit with considerable risk until the marketers get it right.

The challenge for marketers as always will be to find the right proposition for the right target customer and then execute it brilliantly and quicker than the competition.

When it comes to ‘3D printers on the High Street’ I’m not sure that the best opportunity right now is in the supply of 3D printers for consumer use at home.

With one of the leading 3D printer suppliers iMakr offering best selling printers from £850 this is a big investment with the costs of printing materials on top. That’s a lot of money to reproduce the proverbial ‘missing spanner’. Like any new technology many potential customers will also be holding back for the 2nd & 3rd generation products.

So what opportunity could there be in the shorter term?

Well, it could lie in a disruptive form of product customisation and distribution on the High Street removing the need for expensive product shipping & logistics – even potentially taking on current e-commerce models such as Amazon.

My flash of inspiration bizarrely came when ordering a favourite milkshake from Shakeaway and got me thinking ‘if I can go to the High Street and customise my own drink’ why couldn’t similar places produce pretty much anything I like and have it customised and produced right in front of me with 3D printers?

I wouldn’t want or need a 3D printer at home and the economies of scale and physical size would allow a High Street presence to have much better printing capabilities.

Obviously logistics still plays a part. Would I want to go into a town and travel back or is the 3D printing capability actually at a Royal Mail depot?

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I won’t be buying a 3D printed ear, 3D printed house or even a 3D printer anytime soon but there are exciting opportunities here to create a disruptive new business model to offer consumers a compelling customised product offering.

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the latest and greatest mobile innovations from the 2014 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona you may be left a little disappointed and underwhelmed by what the big boys have had to show off.

Sure Samsung, Sony & Nokia have all announced new phones but these have generally been a simple improvement in specification and offering nothing innovative. Even Nokia’s bigger announcement of yet another OS seems to offer ‘Android without all the apps’.

However, the good news is that there is one great example of smartphone innovation and as is often the case it comes from a smaller business with a real focus on creating something disruptive based on better addressing customer needs.

OK, you could argue the YotaPhone 2 which offers two screens – one traditional colour touchscreen and one e-ink touchscreen) is an evolution of last year’s product but it continues to demonstrate this company progressing fast creating a really innovative new product.

So why is the YotaPhone a good example of innovation?

It addresses real customer needs not fully met by existing products – the inclusion of the e-ink screen not only addresses the issue of ‘battery drain’ but it also helps reduce eye fatigue for prolonged use and also helps with visibility when out in daylight.

It is prepared to be bold and think differently about the solution – having two screens with different purposes is a completely unique proposition and helps create a clear brand and product offer for the YotaPhone.

It is simple and well executed – in many ways the YotaPhone is simply an e-reader stuck to the back of a traditional smartphone. Of course, like all great innovations the beauty is in the quality of the execution and the YotaPhone 2 seems to have made great progress in this area both in the physical design and the user experience.

Will the YotaPhone2 become the world’s biggest selling smartphone? Probably not. There are still major marketing issues to be addressed including distribution and pricing.

However, which product at MWC makes me smile most and which company feels like it would be a good place to drive innovation? That would probably be Yota.

As we look forward to all the new opportunities that the New Year will bring – some of the technological ones we will no doubt see at CES next week – it’s worth looking back at what we saw in 2013 and one of the more unusual developments I saw was from Sony who perhaps gaining a little more confidence seem to have let their hair down somewhat with the announcement of their SmartWig project.

The growth in wearable technology is one of the hot development areas as hardware truly integrates with software to deliver exciting new user experiences.

However, the key for the successful businesses will be those that really focus and deliver a great user experience – and this gets even more important as the user actually wears the experience and it becomes part of them both physically and as a symbol of their personality.

This is a really exciting area for us marketers and one that opens up an interesting question in marketing philosophy – to what extent should you and how can you use customer research to develop your proposition?

Marketing textbook 101 that I was taught at college always focused on the need for extensive customer research to make sure you were delivering against core needs.

During the 15 years’ I’ve been developing new digital and mobile propositions I’ve always tried to adhere to this but often noted the challenge as to how to get customers to respond to something uniquely different like SmartWig that they have never previously considered.

Of course, on the other hand some such as Steve Jobs have taken a more direct to market approach believing that the company knows best and that if you create something simple and special enough then customers will learn to love it – and of course this route has proven successful on various occasions.

So as Sony and the various other manufacturers continue to develop exciting new wearable technology it will be interesting to see which find the right approach to involving customers in the development of their propositions and importantly to get the all important customer experience great.

As for me, I’m potentially up for a SmartWig but I’d probably want one that was a more sensible colour for work but could change colours to party at the weekends. It’s also probably partly due to helping keep my slightly receding hairline warmer :-).

I have to say – and my friends will probably laugh – but my first thoughts were that this actually looks pretty great and if I was looking for a new car then this could be a good option. Then a few minutes of rational thinking took hold and I realised the significant barriers that the governments and car industry need to overcome before we see the tipping point of mass adoption of electric cars.

The big picture in the UK is to get to 1.7m electric cars on the road in the UK by 2020 but at just 0.1% of UK car sales there is clearly a long way to go – even with the UK government subsidising each vehicle by £5000.

Certainly having the weight of BMW entering the market with the i3 will help make these vehicles more attractive to the more affluent and they will no doubt push big marketing investment behind it to help position their brand as innovative and in touch with consumer interest.

However, for sales of electric vehicles to really take off I suspect a few barriers still need to be addressed:

1 – Cost – the BMW i3 was actually more affordable than I thought at £25,680 including the government and even though these are well kitted including satellite navigation this is still a 14% premium on the BMW 116d SE that already does 68.9 mpg and unlimited range for those looking at fuel efficient options. The Nissan Leaf at £15,990 is 45% more expensive than a new Nissan Micra.

I think that one of the ways that the industry can help with electric car adoption is to review the car ownership options more towards monthly contract options like mobile phones aided by the ongoing fuel savings.

2 – Future proofing the technology – when spending money on a new car we all want it hold as much value in the future as possible. Electric cars – and specifically the ongoing battery developments – run the risk of becoming ‘old technology’ very quickly thus making the investment even more risky. Manufacturers like BMW need to offer a guarantee that future improved batteries will be made to fit the current car models so customers can benefit and upgrade to new battery technology as it matures.

Ideally there should be a global standard to create a new competitive industry for low cost and ever improving electric car batteries.

3 – Charging points - much investment has already gone into electric car charging points in major cities with Manchester launching 200 new points in July this year. However, at the moment many of them remain unused waiting for the build up in electric car ownership.

One key barrier for me was owning a Victorian house. Whilst very advanced in many ways the Victorians lacked the foresight of creating a parking space for my house. Without that I – any millions of others in the UK – have no way to easily and securely charge my vehicle whilst at home. Parking is always an issue in busy Victorian towns like Kingston but if councils provided one residential charging bay for each main street then this would help people like me that want to take the plunge into electric cars but simply can’t.

Meanwhile I will stick with my diesel car and use my bicycle to ease my environmental concerns.

It’s highlights the leadership imperative to continue to think about the best ways to share and spread communication around a complex global business. With so many ways now to communicate and with many business becoming increasingly geographically diverse it’s little wonder that even with all the latest digital technology the words ‘a communication breakdown’ continue to be said.

One of Tim’s points is that in relying so heavily on digital communication we’re losing the ability to communicate properly using other senses as per Peter Drucker’s teaching.

However, as much as I’m a fan of simplicity I’m not so sure it’s as simple as having more ‘face time’ although having worked in a big Global business at Sony I’m sure that there is plenty more that companies can do to streamline video communication within core corporate communication channels such as email/intranets/social media, etc.

To me, one of the greatest communication complexities that companies need to manage is self-made – simply having too many projects & initiatives without a simple or well-managed structure/process to channel communication.

I’m sure we’ve all been to too many meetings, with too many participants that don’t really deliver results. Very few meetings I’ve been to recently have the old-school basics of clear action points/owners that are followed up on. We’ve all got way too many emails with large distribution lists making many irrelevant. New good systems like Salesforce.com are being introduced but seem to add an extra channel of communication on top of existing email/intranets and other internal reporting.

Quite simply beyond the wise words of Drucker I think the key to simplifying communication in many businesses is simply to have less of it and make sure it is simply and appropriately channeled.

1 – Fewer projects that are only focused on the key business priorities – less small/secret projects that have minor incremental benefits and complicate the big initiatives.

2 – Fewer meetings and internal communication channels – with participants limited to those necessary and guidelines for good practice engagement rewarded.

3 – Sharper project management and communication of action ownership & status for key work initiatives – it seems to have become ‘dated’ to manage meetings and projects with some of the discipline of old but done well it can seriously reduce the time spent wasted clarifying next steps after meetings.

4 – More ‘Face Time’ – both the physical and better integration of video into the selected business communication channels.

I’m not the first to comment on Nokia’s recently announced exciting new Lumia 1020 handset but I think if it is to succeed in the market it will need to be a great case study of excellent product marketing in encouraging customers to change their existing behaviour.

For sure, looking at it simply they are going to win ‘the numbers game’ with a staggering 41MP camera out-trumping the Samsung Galaxy S4 13MP camera and the iPhone 5’s miserly 8MP shooter.

But who the needs a smartphone that takes such large images?

Of course the real answer is no-one and it’s purpose is really to act as a ‘post shoot’ zoom – allowing you to crop the photo to size on the subject you want whilst maintaining a high pixel count for printing. This avoids the need for a physical zoom lens which would add extra weight/size.

But this is where it gets a bit tricky because you’re expecting people to understand and change the way they have taken pictures in the past which is to ‘zoom and then snap’.

I’m a strong believer that a great user experience can be the source of competitive advantage and if Nokia can execute this brilliantly then they could really be onto something.

But what do they need to do to achieve this?

Create an interesting new name to try and ‘own’ this key feature and benefit – something like ‘Sharp Zoom‘ if used creatively and consistently could help differentiate the offering from other brands

An interesting and engaging marketing campaign to focus on the benefits of this clear point of difference – e.g ‘what would you cut to size?’

Show off the competitive comparison with clear and compelling digital assests to highlight the image quality benefits of this feature vs. Samsung and Apple

Simple and fast ‘zoom’ app user experience on the device itself – making it easy to crop, size and use for different formats such as online publishing and saving for printing

If the Lumia 1020’s is going to tempt a significant number of users to dump their iPhones or Android smartphones then it will really need to pull off some clear & simple marketing communications to get customers understanding why they would possibly want a 41MP smartphone.